He runs out of the apartment, and she notices a wineglass and a prescription bottle on the floor, almost hidden by the skirt of the couch. She’s stunned to see that Rose has been taking Roxicodone, a trade name for oxycodone hydrochloride, an opioid analgesic that’s notoriously habit-forming. The prescription of one hundred tablets was filled ten days ago. She takes the top off the bottle and counts the fifteen-milligram green tablets. There are seventeen left.

“Rose!” Scarpetta shakes her. She’s warm and sweating. “Rose, wake up! Can you hear me! Rose!”

Scarpetta goes to the bathroom and returns with a cool washcloth, places it on Rose’s forehead, and holds her hand, talking to her, trying to rouse her. Then Marino is back. He looks frantic and frightened as he hands Scarpetta the medical bag.

“She moved the couch. I was supposed to do it,” he says, his dark glasses staring at the couch.

Rose stirs as a siren sounds in the distance. Scarpetta takes a blood pressure cuff and a stethoscope from her medical bag.

“I promised to come over and move it,” Marino says. “She moved it by herself. It was over there.” His dark glasses look at an empty space near a window.

Scarpetta pushes up Rose’s sleeve, slides the stethoscope on her arm, wraps the cuff just above the bend in the arm, tight enough to stop blood flow.

The siren is very loud.

She squeezes the bulb, inflates the cuff, then opens the valve to release the air slowly as she listens to the blood beating its way along the artery. Air hisses quietly as the cuff deflates.

The siren stops. The ambulance is here.

Systolic pressure eighty-six. Diastolic pressure fifty-eight. She moves the diaphragm over Rose’s chest and back. Respiration is depressed, and she’s hypotensive.

Rose stirs, moves her head.

“Rose?” Scarpetta says loudly. “Can you hear me?”

Her eye lids flutter open.

“I’m going to take your temperature.” She places a digital thermometer under Rose’s tongue and in seconds it beeps. Temperature ninety-nine- point-one. She holds up the bottle of pills. “How many did you take?” she asks. “How much wine did you drink?”

“It’s just the flu.”

“You move the couch yourself?” Marino asks her, as if it matters.

She nods. “Overdid it. That’s all.”

Rapid footsteps and the clatter of paramedics and a stretcher in the hallway.

“No,” she protests. “Send them away.”

Two EMTs in blue jumpsuits fill the doorway and push the stretcher inside. On top of it is a defibrillator and other equipment.

Rose shakes her head. “No. I’m all right. I’m not going to the hospital.”

Ed appears in the doorway, worried, looking in.

“What’s the problem, ma’am?” One of the EMTs, blond with pale blue eyes, comes over to the couch and looks closely at Rose. He looks closely at Scarpetta.